For this interior I continued the idea of painting brightly-coloured objects on a black background, but temporarily departed from the theme of contemporary interiors to use some period elements, such as the georgian window. I did this as I thought that these objects would add an atmosphere that went well with the dark background.
I also had a very clear idea of the colours I wanted to use, so added the flowers to go with the purple and green of the rocking chair.
i use this chair recurringly because it allows me a lot of scope for distortion, and the vertical pieces of wood at its back allow me to create a ‘dissolving’ appearance, by painting some of them as if they are incomplete. I also think that this striking effect creates a strong sense of unreality.
For this painting I again used a mixture of acrylics and waterbased oils. I found the waterbased oils produced a particularly interesting effect when painting the tablecloth. I intitially used them to create softly-blended tone in the fabric, but as I attempted to perfect the light and dark areas the paint became ever thicker and the white paint that I added to lighten areas began to blend with the blue underneath. To solve this problem, I tried scraping away the recent layers of paint, and in doing so found that this gave that area of the tablecloth a translucent effect, so decided to leave it as it was.
For the light around the lamp I used dry paint and a splayed brush for an appearance of glistening, scattered light.
Once again I tried to make the objects in the composition appear detatched from their surroundings and each other, in order to create an unreal quality within the image.
Next time I would try a more simplified, pre-planned composition as I think that this time I added too many different components so that they detract from each other and from the composition’s impact.
